Friday, September 16, 2016

Priest allowed to return to ministry after two months

Paedophile priest John Farrell
was allowed to return to public ministry in NSW just two months after
being forced on "sick leave" due to complaints he had abused altar boys,
reports AAP in The West Australian.

At a 1984 meeting of Church leaders in Armidale, the decision was
made to send Farrell, then in his 30s, to the east Tamworth parish in
northern NSW despite allegations he had abused a number of boys while an
assistant priest at Moree, the Royal Commission into Institutional
Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard yesterday.

The Bishop of Wagga Wagga, Gerard Hanna, then a priest at east
Tamworth, said the then-Bishop of Armidale, Henry Kennedy, had assumed
two months was long enough to allow for any of Farrell's victims to come
forward.

"He constantly resorted to the phrase, 'no one has come forward,
there are no charges. There's no reason why he can't be put back into
ministry'," Bishop Hanna said on Wednesday.

The reasons for Farrell's removal from Moree were kept quiet, the
Bishop said, and there was no report to the police or public inquiry.

When he asked Bishop Kennedy for details about what Farrell had done,
he was told: "It's that usual thing, he was messing around with altar
boys" and "you have got to regard him as a big risk and give him
restricted ministry and keep an eye on him."

In Tamworth, Farrell was forbidden from conducting school Masses and
given limited access to children, which he "deeply resented," according
to Bishop Hanna.